DO BRANDS MATTER ANYMORE? - Is Gibson, Fender, PRS, NEVE or SSL YOUR Thing?

hey everybody I'm Rick Beato this is retro today we're going to be talking about brand loyalty and if it actually means anything anymore uh no well yes I mean maybe I don't know when I say brand loyalty I mean you know slash plays Gibson Les Paul's or John Mayer placed rats John Mayer placed rats or when I built the studio here the first thing people asked when they were coming into a studio that wasn't a commercial studio is do you have Neves now they didn't even know what Neves were but that was an important thing that was a brand do you have no man mics those were brands that meant something to them that that gave the studio legitimacy regardless of whether there are other mic breeze or microphones that are just as good or better like the earthworks SR 30 condenser mics or the burl B 1 or B 1 D 500 series mic breeze well I mean there's there's multiple things to unpack in that one statement so let's start with guitars and guitarists so slash plays Les Paul's John Mayer plays well now a PRS strap which you know we've been through that whole controversy I think in that respect it it does sort of matter with the older generation of players right I still think it would be weird if slash switched from a Les Paul today and started playing a PRS or something and you know it was kind of weird going back to John Mayer it was a little weird when he first started playing with dead and company to see him playing a semi-hollow PRS now he's kind of adopted that but with younger players guys that are now coming up in the game to you know the next generation of prefer to Oso players I don't really see that specific brand loyalty when I think about guys like Joey Landreth for example no relation to Sonny Landreth he I don't think of him as like oh he's a total Les Paul guy or a total you know like Derek Trucks is an SG I've the only other thing I've ever seen Derek Trucks play was a Goldtop Les Paul when he breaks a string on his SG you know but with younger guys I don't really see that anymore well it's interesting because I when I was making one of my guitar historical videos 1970 1979 or even the the 29 to 69 I have a video Jeff Beck playing in Les Paul now Jeff Beck did play a Les Paul but when you think of Jeff Beck you don't think of a less long strap think of a strap many guitarists back in the day Peter Frampton plays a Les Paul three pickup Les Paul or he did on Fram diems life well he also played a strat him he played multiple guitars yeah just so happens that he was on the cover playing his three pickup Les Paul right or or Clapton I think is a good example of someone who is transitioned through the years I mean you think about the pepino sessions the may all of Blues breaker record that was a 335 years one 335 got for a long time and then playing with cream he had his his SG and then in the 80s and late 80s early 90s he switched to the strat you know and and I've guess he's still kind of a strat guy to this day so I think in that respect ya brand loyalty matters with maybe boulders and rain boil to a brand or brand identification in the new metal movement if I were to say what were the two what was what was the guitar that was part of the new metal PR strs yeah and what were the amps that were part of the metal Mesa Mesa yeah for sure that was all Rex triple rat who were accent wrinkled trip triple Rex that took a long time I think for them to shake those yeah both those companies it took a while to shake that they were so strongly identified to that movement that it was hard to get people to endorse and/or start playing those guitars or people of note yeah well I think that was part of part of the part of that was the brands themselves the companies themselves you know PRS in their you know early 2000s turn of the century really was pushing they were putting their guitars in the hands of the metal players and it worked for them from a marketing perspective almost too good because now even today when I think of a PRS guitar you know outside of maybe Carlos Santana my immediate thought is new metal guys and and now I've seen PRS specifically has started to transition to more like country players like commercial country guys it's interesting because I I thought I used to think that about PRS until probably about six seven years ago I think that they started to that just has become a brand that that I don't really necessarily associate with with anything like that anymore it's interesting but Mesa I feel like was held back yeah by new metal whereas PRS seemed to to collide they've overcome that and and that's I think a testament to their marketing team and kind of a vision of Paul even through this whole John Mayer stuff that's been happening in the past year they've still I mean they've sold a lot of those silver skies you know and every one of those John Mayer super Eagle semi-hollow guitars they made four I think like eleven thousand twelve thousand dollars they've sold all of those you know so I will say this to not to interrupt but anybody can say anything they want about the John Mayer guitar but seeing it in person the pickguard and I'm not a cosmetic kind of guy you buy that right I don't care about that yeah pickguard and the painting paint job looks so good together it's unbelievable well the interesting thing that I learned about because I did a video over on my channel compared I have a John Mayer strat one of the actual Fender black one strats and I did a direct head-to-head comparison between my strat and a silver sky and in the video I talked about like man this paint color looks like it belongs on a car and I learned from a commenter that they're actually Tesla paint colors like on the silver sky you get their Tesla colors did ya Don model-free I mean it is beautiful paint job on it and that the combination the white on white pickguard it's hard to make that look good yeah and it really matches perfectly yeah yeah traditionally I'm not a big fan of the stark white pit guards especially on black strats because I feel like it makes it look cheap you know it to me it calls to mind like uh you something you get on Squire but that silver that they have that read that they have anything's really sharp color but going back to we're talking about second ago Mesa I don't think has done a good job of moving past that identification with being a new middle brand heavy metal kind of guitar brand for me that's not the style of music that I play and so I tend to shy away from Mesa amps because in my mind I just associate them with really heavy guitar sounds inside don't go for me yes my brother called me this morning and told me there's a new Mason tap out called the Fillmore 50 the name Fillmore to me that's what I think I think tomorrow I think actually I think of all classic rock cuz there's so many Fillmore great concerts there yeah just in the name that brand name is brilliant yeah I haven't heard anything about the amp I've not seen it he told me played through and it sounded great so okay yeah this is a good example I don't know anything about this amp but just from the name my initial thought is like oh is it their version of a plexi like a hundred watt plexi or 50 watt plexi something that uh you know Duane Allman would have played is that I don't know I have nothing I don't know my brother said it he played it it was a great amp you really liked it and we talked for about two minutes this morning and I thought no and I said to him why that's a great name yeah and I thought great branding right there because any other name every name gives you a I mean they had the transit transit Lander right the electric dine they have the Stiletto they have all these different brand names but still I guess their most popular amps are like the mark five right five and the the dual rack and triple rack and both of those amps are kind of synonymous with you the prog rock scene or just regular I mean Dave Grohl you know a dual rectifier is it right do and and they're great amps man they're hot yeah pop punk right 182 bands like that would play mazes it was very common yeah everybody played bassist or a lot of bands played maze from the mid-2009 TS through the through the early 2000 if you're trying to get that sound man the great amps for that but going back to what you're talking about a second ago with the studio stuff I think that's an example of something that doesn't that brand loyalty doesn't matter as much with anymore right you know part of them doesn't tell me this you had a negative to you mesas and PRS is because of new metal had a negative connotation they had a negative connotation but now you know the more experienced I get the more of their gear I play that that's kind of changing and the way they're marketing their equipment is kind of changing that but again that's just because I'm not a new metal well I just don't think that people even care about that as much not as much anymore and a good example of that is like the studio stuff you're talking about because nowadays especially in the recording world if you have a laptop and a decent mic in an interface you can you know what you're doing you can make a really great sounding record right down to things like interfaces yeah no one would have been been caught dead using a Focusrite interface yeah focus right made very high-end pieces of gear if you go back to their red compressor people like chris lord-alge even use any of their reds there their red series the has been around the mike breeze and the compressors and things like that and then they went through a period where they made really inexpensive here and now they've raised their bar yeah up to where I think that they've resurrected their name by making higher well i or quad there's also I think they partially couldn't help that because there was a period of time through the early 2000s to now where there was a disconnect between you know the price of the technology in the digital recording world obviously anything electronic when it first comes out is really expensive and there was a I think a period of time where brands like focus right personas and all these people were trying to open up the entry-level recording market but they couldn't get good quality converters they couldn't get good preamps that you good they just were to write a master price range and that entry-level price range well now the the cost of manufacturing and all the stuff that's come down to the point where you know my main interface at home that I use that I make all my videos with and stuff is a focus right like the 18 I 20 to $500 interface and it sounds great well people used to say what kind of interface do you have and people came in here do you have a you know are you running Pro Tools do you have a 192 do you have some type of a clock I mean people were bands they'd always have one guy that was more sophisticated yeah I had a clock in Universal Audio 2192 that was a converter a two channel converter and had a great clock on it and and people would notice things like that I don't think now nowadays I don't think people notice anything I could have a mothership in there and nobody would care yeah because I think nowadays the technology has gotten so good I mean 10 years ago 15 years ago you needed to spend the money to get really good quality converters and really good quality clock because there was an audible difference between the high-end stuff and the low-end stuff now it's kind of getting into I think a little bit of like the law of diminishing returns where you want to get something that's 10 percent better you've got to spend 60 or 70 percent more on something where you know anything like you a universal audio is a really good example the Apollo series stuff I think you could run a world-class studio using in like a name well in case a case in point I was doing a record probably I'm not sure when the first the Apollo 8 came out probably seven eight years ago something I think it was 2010 so I was doing a session and my Pro Tools rig went down and yeah there wasn't enough time to get I couldn't get a new computer or anything it's just the interface went down yeah I don't know one of the cards or something so I immediately went down to Guitar Center and I an Apollo eight and within ten minutes it had the the db25 connectors in the back within 10 minutes we were back up and running yeah and that I started I realized then that I mean you know it wasn't there's a little bit of a learning curve because we weren't used to recording like that but I realized that wow this is gonna replace eventually which it has yeah it replaces things like like the Pro Tools hardware right and of course the plugins you know I'm a huge fan of the UAD plugins I own most of them and I've been using them for years and and getting back to it like the the brand loyalty thing I think that now matters less people aren't concerned with when they go to a studio okay what kind of interface what kind of converters are you using because you know whether you're using Universal Audio or antelope or something like that it's all I'm gonna get the job done well but I think what still matters and you see this now in the boutique market Boutique Guitar World boutique recording world is the the NOI 'men named the u-87 the you 67 47 the Neve name 1073 1081 those names still matter because those sounds still matter and now you have so many different companies in all different price brackets that are manufacturing versus eva's 1073 yeah 1081 1176 is so well of course that begs the question is Neve even Neve anymore the AMS Neve is not the Neve of your of my era alright and now there's like what two different needs because you have a MS Neve and then you have Rupert Neve designs which is a different thing well it may make they make different obviously they're different but BAE for example yeah make incredibly good Neve 1073 1084 1066 then they have their there 10:28 1032 models they have a you know ten bands of mid-range people look at them and they look like Neve since people don't even ask anything right I mean I don't honestly think that people I don't think that they look at those things like they used to they really don't when people started be able to afford home studios and and home recording here a lot of people in the early 2000s could afford maybe one mice nice mic pre and they would own that and they would do a lot of research and every band that would come in there'd always be one guy that was that guy that was usually incredibly annoying and he would want to know everything about it what why using this yeah why aren't you using that why use an 1176 on here yeah why read them an la-2a is better for that yeah I mean that was before my my time I think and I think part of the reason that brand loyalty matters less now is because like my generation we came up recording in the box yeah we've talked about this before most of my other than working here at your studio interning for years I was able to get my hands on good outboard gear but had I not done that my only experience as a young 20-something with no money trying to learn how to record would be plug-in versions of the recordings I I like to call them inboard gear because we always use them to record into the computer right and then would use plugins afterwards yeah yeah so an onboard gear right it's so not in that case it's I think not as important that's why I think people aren't as worried about oh do you have real 1073 use of a vintage or they modern are they from vintage well they both are right they've also had people well-known producers engineers that are famous that have come out with their own plugins and they see and they say well I don't hear any difference yeah and when people hear that enough yeah that it begins to lose its importance learning that even if it's actually true yeah I mean I would much rather record through a 1073 mic pre then to record through a 1073 plugin yeah yeah I mean obviously but again for somebody like me who's yelling and coming up I might not be able to afford a bae 1073 but i could spend the hundred bucks or whatever for the 73 from wavez you know how much is on bucks yeah well yeah I mean it's and I think that's good and bad the good side is it's getting more people involved in the recording process and more people getting their hands dirty actually making music on their own I think that is a good thing downside is you it's harder to learn the actual gear and the actual because recording in an analogue signal path is different than recording straight in the box where all you have is a mic in an interface and you're doing everything on your laptop so brands that you would consider still have that cachet yeah let's say in the guitar world let's in the pedal world let's talk about that for a minute man well the pedal world is tough because I mean it's just exploded in the last 10 years so I think to start with the pedals we should start with actual pedals that have that cachet first and foremost comes to mind too screamer mm-hmm everybody makes a tube screamer yeah everybody makes a fuzz face everybody makes a big muff every generation of thigma that's right so I think those pedal designs are iconic and those much like we were talking about a second ago with the 1070 3s and 1080 ones those designs matter as far as brand name goes everyone has a tube screamer on their board every what this is a tube screamer actually the actual ibanez tube screamer have more cachet have more importance knows of the name no because now the market is so diluted because everybody makes a tube screamer now it's okay what flavor of tube screamer do you want do you want the JHS version that has every different type of you know different op amp chip in it or do you want the you know the earthquake or palisades I mean like so I think for me if I'm buying a tube screamer my initial thought is not to go straight for the actual tube screamer it's to go boutique and try out all the different flavors of tube screamer so I don't think that matters as much anymore in in the peddle world but we're talking earlier about boss pedals now boss and when when pedals first started coming out you had things you had the echo placement let's let's talk about just pedals mxr was the first big company that was manufacturing pedals that were commonly bought the analogue chorus the flanger the phase 90 those were staples people had those the distortion plus those were really really common I'm partial to those I'm from Rochester that's where they were made yeah and those were the first even before boss I believe I want to say that that that mxr was the first big pedal manufacturer and you are saying that people still yeah like those well they're really Moran's yeah mxr electro-harmonix boss right it's funny when when I look at guys from from an older players from an older generation who have their board even sometimes young older than me older generation I look at the way I mean you used to have a pedal board that was set up this way where you have what set it up still like it was from 1992 or it was you know a power strip but most of wall warts and you had this big gigantic pedal board where my generation is more into the smaller more compact with a power supply everything's run clean and now I'm seeing a transition from even guys who came up in my time from like you know the early 2000s and on to now everybody's shifting to these multi effect pedals it started with the Kemper and and the axe effects and now you have the line six helix and all these things that are these floor controller digital multi effects but why though I mean my brother's started was telling me last year two years ago the h9 oh I've replaced my stuff with an h9 and he just was raving about it oh you can control it you can change things from your phone I put my phone on my stand I change I change sets that way why though why do people like this I think it's this idea of convenience you're getting more bang for your buck so to speak and and real estate on your pedal board I have an H 9 it's a great pedal sounds great and I think people are wanting to only be able to only having to take one thing to a gig I have my guitar and I have my multi-effect floor pedal that has amp sounds every guitar convenience convenience generation here and I'm experiencing a little bit of resistance to that I get people commenting on my channel all the time like oh dude you should just get a helix or whatever and for me it's like well I like my pedal board I like the way I have it set up I don't necessarily want to switch to the helix even though it probably sounds great and it's probably really convenient easy to use I'll probably end up getting one just to use on the channel anyways but so it's interesting to see how these different generations of players are transitioning and how they record and how they play live and what they use and so I have hundreds and hundreds of pedals I just bought a pedal the other the other day the wrench right out here it's the what's it called the red so I just bought this pedal because it's a binson echo clone and I'm not endorsed by them at all I heard that David Gilmour played one it's very cool man and I started thinking about the Bentson echo after I interviewed Peter Frampton he talked about that's what he played through as well he said me and my friend Dave Gilmour we played through Benson echoes which that whole sentence to me is my book yeah my friend Dave Gilmour now Dave yo Dave sorry dude first name so so my brother told me my brother my brother John says oh yeah you should check out this pedal it's really cool I watched a demo on it and you should really check it out so I look it up I was like okay don't buy this I watched one demo Rhett's gonna do a demo of the pedal that's way better than the demo that I that I watch I assume you're gonna do a demo of it Regan let me tell you with it yeah okay so rap will do a far better demo that you guys should watch on it that it's just so interesting what did what were your first impressions of it well when I first got it I mean obviously if he played played with it for about 30 minutes or so yeah I was on it for 30 minutes and it's a really this is a really useful pedal for two things one I would like to actually do recording with this you know we talked about when the levee breaks that drum sound was a binson echo and so my initial thought Arlis of what people say in the comments section on my video about it okay so my initial thought was okay well let's put this in a recording chain and it affects sind and like push drums through it push and red said well I wish it was in stereo and I said why they were never there weren't in stereo yeah I mean it that's again my initial millennial guitarists reactions like yeah it needs to be stereo so I can get huge huge effect you and then the other thing too is I would like to put this after a fuzz pedal and just sit there and make and in my demo that's probably what I will do is use this as kind of like what I call a character effect which is just something really unique that you can do some some interesting soundscape kind of stuff with I need to spend some more time actually figuring it out because it's laid out a lot differently than your normal delay pedal you have four different playback heads that you can switch between independently or all together there's no tap tempo on here so you have to dial it in independently but it's a killer little pedal man so I have we have a Kemper here XFX hundreds of pedals and I like them all yeah I do i I used them all I used my axe effects on a couple videos recently I use my amplifiers and a lot of my videos yeah I've used the Kemper we're actually making a Kemper profile I'm profiling all of my amps with my assistant Ken we're in the process of doing that that's going to take probably another month or so but we use all different things and I embrace all these different technology I think that they all have certain values to them whether it's speed or flexibility yeah or unpredictability yeah this has that unpredictable you don't know what you can get from that to me that's a well we we live in a golden age of gear right now in almost any aspect of the musical world but especially for guitarists and bass players well I would say for pro audio as well yeah Pro exactly pro audio I mean this is a golden age you can get some incredibly high quality great sounding stuff for not very much money there's more options out there than there ever have been as far and guitars we haven't talked about you know guitar brand quite yet but I mean there's so many things from cheap entry-level stuff that is that sounds great you know all the way up to really high-end boutique one guy in his garage making these you know holy grail amps or pedals or whatever and everything in between I mean it's never been a better time to be a musician or well I think that there's the because of da w's yeah and it started happening in the early 2000s because of the the people had the ability to have a studio with a high-powered computer have Pro Tools or logic or sonar or whatever people would use at the time Cubase a company started coming out with new microphones new mic pries and then you have the 500 series yeah what would you call it form factor where you have these modules that slide into a power supply and you have everything you can think of you want a 10 73 they got it you want a Trident a range Mike they got it you want an e API 2264 compressor they got an API 5 550 a 550 B 560 eq's they got them anything you can think of now they're making series it you've never seen before heard I mean there's now companies out there that are making new original designs or combinations of all these things so that in addition to the microphones and other types of gear that is made for the front end of recording on warding yeah in boarding in boarding huh so now I want to talk about guitar brands and guitar brand loyalty we talked a second ago about how it's you know we have the players who are iconic and that might be changing but what about guitar brands themselves I personally don't feel any loyalty to you know I own fenders I own Gibson's boutique stuff I don't feel a tremendous loyalty to any of the big name brands partially because I feel like some of those brands Gibson in particular aren't really making their best instruments in this era in this age hopefully that's about to change with this new leadership that's coming in but you know fender I think is out of all the big box guitar yeah fenders doing probably the best and I would also throw Gretch in there as well well NP RS and PRS you know PRS are making their best guitars they've ever made right you know a while ago in fact I did a video about comparing righteous guitars had one of the first PRS custom 24 has ever made it was serial number 89 and I compared that one to a modern 20 18 custom 24 and I'll link the video in the description but what I found was the newer one was way better than the older one and from what I've seen about Paul Reed Smith he will tell you that himself like yeah we've never made better guitars than we are right now every year I like the 527 yeah I'm actually partial to the four I said the rat the other day I was saying tourette said what what PRS you like I said I like that guitar the 527 he's like what is that one you mean the 594 and I said yeah like that one too they're both good I think they could change their branding a little bit this is confusing to stay on top of all PRS models but yeah so I think PRS is a great example and there's a lot people that are definitely loyal to the PRS brand name yeah but there's people that loyal I have my new Kiesel guitar that people that I love that people are loyal to that brand you know why because that's a smaller manufacturer that people feel invested in hmm I'm law I have brand loyalty to my nobo guitars because that's a I have a personal relationship with the person who builds those guitars right I feel invested in that because my money I can see when I purchase a guitar from them that money is going directly into their company and helping them grow their brand with with a bigger box brand like Gibson or Fender you don't necessarily see that you know I haven't bought a guitar you know right you've been coming here for you say three years you've been coming here for probably 10 years yes oh my god Wow long enough I never bought any new guitars over never know all my guitars are I mean I've my oldest guitar that I've owned the longest is a guild classical that I bought in 1977 so I have a guitar that I bought in the 70s sitting here and I've got some old guitars I've got some new guitars but my Gibson acoustic there's a 57 when I buy a guitar that's really good I just keep it but Ivan I have many different brands of guitars you go over there and you'll see Gretch you'll see fender you see Gibson you see Kissel you'll see aria pro ii and electro what if you dent Electro's and you'll see me play these guitars all these different guitars on different videos yeah I play guitar that I think is going to make me play something interesting right either that or I want to be historically accurate when I do a video and I'm doing the solo to stairway to heaven it was done on a Telecaster right so I'm gonna play a Telecaster on it now I don't have an SG now so I did pay to play back in black it's sacrilegious I played it on a Les Paul although no one mentioned it but well I specifically did not want video because but I put Angus in the picture playing his SG yeah yeah I mean it's they're all just tools man they're tools for a job and it doesn't i'm personally it doesn't matter to me what you play or what you don't play what you're into what you what you've gone into because it's so subjective especially a guitar I'd say of all the gear that we use guitars are the most subjective things because you have a really personal interaction with that instrument and so you you pick a guitar up based on what you want to say what you want to get across what you're trying to do or to be historically accurate but that's why I don't think that kind of brand loyalty matters as much in the guitar world you know I when I was going through the with the Kiesel guitar when they're asking me well what's the neck radius e1 and I asked Dave and he said oh you like flat radiuses 18 doesn't like the 18 or 20 but that's actually not true because that my my Gibson's there I've got the 56 reissue and I have the my blacklist ball and the Les Paul's are what twelve radius think so yeah and those play incredibly well too I don't it there are so many elements to how a guitar plays how its set up that kind of frets it has that that to me when I played the silver sky which is what a seven radius or something than half yeah percent and I didn't notice it being odd at all it'd be great right and that was one thing with that guitar in particular that the internet was freaking out about was oh my god it's it's got that vintage you're not gonna be able to play it reality is know if it's set up properly it plays great you just have to have the guitar set up for that that radiates but you're so right like there's so many little my new factors that go into making a great guitar a great guitar and that's not there's not a direct correlation between price and guitar quality or or playability you have you know obviously a more expensive guitar will have better construction and may might be made of better materials but I talked about this this all time Jack Pearson is a Nashville guitarist he's one of the best guitarists I've ever seen live he has some of the best guitar tone I've ever heard the man is mind blowing he plays a stock off-the-shelf Squire strap the only mod that he does is he changes he has one has a black pickguard with black knobs and he changes the volume knob to a white one so you can see it better on stage we did the Joe Bonamassa blues crews a couple years ago with one of the bands I was in and he was on that cruise and I watched every one of his sets he played a whole show with that Squire strat with a stock tube screamer sitting on top of a deluxe Reaper well that just goes to show you that it's all in the fingers yeah and it was some of the best guitar playing the best sounding guitar tone I've ever heard you know all right so we want to know what you think do you think brand loyalty matters anymore or are you loyal to one brand in particular you will only buy their gear or only play their guitars leave your comments in the comment section Rhett's channel is youtube.com slash rhett Shull link down below and don't forget to subscribe here thank you all for watch

Channel: Rick Beato

Views: 326,854

Rating: 4.8258004 out of 5

Keywords: brand loyalty, les paul, paul reed smith, prs vs gibson, les paul vs stratocaster, gibson vs fender, Mesa, Neve, SSL, the importance of branding, the importance of branding yourself, Brand, New Metal, djent metal, john mayer silver sky, electric guitar, mic preamp, microphones, daw comparison, daw comparison 2018, pedal board, guitar compressor pedal shootout, guitar eq pedal shootout, guitar boost pedal shootout, Tube Screamer, delay pedal, delay pedal shootout

Id: gkSP5yGkZXo

Length: 36min 32sec (2192 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 22 2018